In this study of literature and law before and since the Civil War, Stephen M. Best shows how American conceptions of slavery, property, and the idea of the fugitive were profoundly interconnected.....

True skepticism is an attitude of constant questioning, a mode of thinking Frederick Crews held so dear he applied it to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, an intellectual tradition he initially belie....

The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: sta....

James Hogg (1770-1835) is increasingly recognised as a major Scottish author and one of the most original figures in European Romanticism. 16 essays written by international experts on Hogg draw on....

Set in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, Kidnapped transforms the Romantic historical novel into the modern thriller. Its heartstopping scenes of cross-country pursuit, distilled to a pure inten....

Epigram: a terse observation aspiring to the universal and irreducible. Generally about human foible or fate. Relies on paradox, hyperbole, or wordplay to compel a flash of recognition. Kissing cou....

Exploring the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century, Catherine Gallagher reveals the connections between the increasing prestige of female authorship, ....

This is critical reading, thinking, and writing of the highest order. It is a book of many pleasures, in which an earlier and more self-serious period in literary history is read with a foreknowled....

Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form draws on the Marxist theory of reification to undertake a theoretical study of the class-based construction of racial identity in the novels of four writers:....

This book traces connections between Georgic verse and developments in other spheres from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries: the mediation of perception by scientific instrumen....

The 20th century was a time of great change, particularly in the arts, but seldom explored were the female poets of that time. Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp have put together a comprehensive anthol....

Adam Usk, a Welsh lawyer in England and Rome during the first years of the fifteenth century, lived a peculiar life. He was, by turns, a professor, a royal advisor, a traitor, a schismatic, and a s....

Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, wh....

Most contemporary critics characterize Shakespeare and his tribe of fellow playwrights and players as resolutely secular, interested in religion only as a matter of politics or as a rival source of....

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination....

The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche thought that philosophy could learn a valuable lesson from prayer, which teaches us how to attend, wait, and be open for what might ha....

During the fifteenth century John Lydgate was the most famous poet in England, filling commissions for the court, the aristocracy, and the guilds. He wrote for an elite London readership that was h....

Stealing Obedience investigates works in Latin and Old English to pursue a series of questions about agency (here to use the term in its most general meaning) that emerge from my study of the disco....

In this original and engaging work, author Kent Puckett looks at how British filmmakers imagined, saw, and sought to represent its war during wartime through film. The Second World War posed unique....

First poetry collection in nearly twenty years. In language that is pointed, innovative and profoundly optimistic, Reed weaves politics and war with Nigerian poetry and jazz all in the service of h....

Combining historical, literary and linguistic evidence from Old English and Latin, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England creates a new, more complete picture of who and what pre-Conquest English p....

For the Anglo-Saxons, Latin was a language of choice that revealed a multitude of beliefs and desires about themselves as subjects, believers, scholars, and artists. In this groundbreaking collecti....

Artists, poets, agriculturalists and political theorists construct the imaginary countryside of England while the country itself, from landowner to peasant, tears itself apart in the Civil War. Awarde....

Taking his title from a letter by Henry Adams, and his subtitle in part from a short story by Henry James, Zwerdling (Orwell and the Left; Virginia Woolf and the Real World) examines the expatriate....